New research on factual and counterfactual conditionals
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted April 30, 2020
Orlando Espino and Ruth Byrne report two new papers on factual and counterfactual conditionals. In a paper now out in Cognitive Science, they show how counterfactual conditionals systematically suppress inferences. Here’s the abstract of their paper:
We examine two competing effects of beliefs on conditional inferences. The suppression effect occurs for conditionals, for example, “if she watered the plants they bloomed,” when beliefs about additional background conditions, for example, “if the sun shone they bloomed” decrease the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens (from “the plants did not bloom” to “therefore she did not water them”). In contrast, the counterfactual elevation effect occurs for counterfactual conditionals, for example, “if she had watered the plants they would have bloomed,” when beliefs about the known or presupposed facts, “she did not water the plants and they did not bloom” increase the frequency of inferences such as modus tollens. We report six experiments that show that beliefs about additional conditions take precedence over beliefs about presupposed facts for counterfactuals. The modus tollens inference is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain additional conditions (Experiments 1a and 1b). The denial of the antecedent inference (from “she did not water the plants” to “therefore they did not bloom”) is suppressed for counterfactuals that contain alternatives (Experiments 2a and 2b). We report a new “switched-suppression” effect for conditionals with negated components, for example, “if she had not watered the plants they would not have bloomed”: modus tollens is suppressed by alternatives and denial of the antecedent by additional conditions, rather than vice versa (Experiments 3a and 3b). We discuss the implications of the results for alternative theories of conditional reasoning.
The paper can be downloaded here.
In another paper with Phil Johnson-Laird, the authors explored the parallel meanings of factual and counterfactual conditionals. The paper is published in Memory & Cognition (downloadable here), and its abstract is here:
The mental model theory postulates that the meanings of conditionals are based on possibilities. Indicative conditionals—such as “If he is injured tomorrow, then he will take some leave”—have a factual interpretation that can be paraphrased as It is possible, and remains so, that he is injured tomorrow, and in that case certain that he takes some leave. Subjunctive conditionals, such as, “If he were injured tomorrow, then he would take some leave,” have a prefactual interpretation that has the same paraphrase. But when context makes clear that his injury will not occur, the subjunctive has a counterfactual paraphrase, with the first clause: It was once possible, but does not remain so, that he will be injured tomorrow. Three experiments corroborated these predictions for participants’ selections of paraphrases in their native Spanish, for epistemic and deontic conditionals, for those referring to past and to future events, and for those with then clauses referring to what may or must happen. These results are contrary to normal modal logics. They are also contrary to theories based on probabilities, which are inapplicable to deontic conditionals, such as, “If you have a ticket, then you must enter the show.”